of in the brief section that bears the title “Refutation of Idealism” (B 274–275), to which, in the preface to the B edition, he added a correction (B xxxix–xli). Kant says: I am empirically aware of my presence, namely in the first place in the sense of the flow of presentations. My presence is a being-present in time. But the one-after-another of presentations is possible, as one-after-another, only on the basis of something permanent that is independent of this one-after-another. Insofar as this one-after-another is the inner one-after-another of my presentations; and granted the necessity that there be something permanent that is independent of the one-after-another—on these conditions, it is also necessary that there be given the presence of a [realm of] outer being: something permanent outside of me. The presence of this something-permanent—the world—is necessarily included in the determination of my own existence as within-time, and forms a single experience with it. This experience of myself, Kant says, as the pure one-after-another of presentations, would not really take place unless there were at the same time something external, something permanent. Indeed, he says:

The “How?” of this {connection} can no more be explained than we can explain further how we think at all of what abides in time, whose simulta-neity [356] with what changes gives rise to the concept of change. (B xli)

This reflection, which constitutes the kernel of the “Refutation of Idealism” in Kant’s sense, gives expression to the aforementioned connection of time and permanence. The function of time becomes clear here: What is present first of all is an empirically given existence; this something-present presupposes within itself as pure change and one-after-another, that there is something present that is permanent, something that abides and does not change in time: the world of things, or nature in the broad sense. Or if we begin from the side of nature and the world: In nature, taken as something that abides, within its whole field, there is a region of happenings—viz., the pure one-after-another of my presentations—that likewise have the peculiar feature of being accessible to me, from which we can conclude that there must be present something permanent as the ontological condition of the one-after-another. With this, Kant claims to have carried out, from out of and by way of the concept of time, a strict and necessary proof of the presence of the outside world. We must keep clearly in mind the point of departure of this proof—which is the pure presence of a one-after-another whose kind of being is not different from the kind of being of the what-is-permanent, which consequently is shown to be the world as what-is-permanent.

Therefore, time is the phenomenon with relation to which the presence of nature is demonstrated to be co-present with the empirical I.